The present invention relates to a process for the catalytic restructuring of organic molecules, to a process for the production of such catalysts and to the catalysts per se.
Catalysts are often categorised as being homogeneous or heterogeneous dependent upon whether the catalyst is in the same physical state as the compound or compounds being catalytically reacted. Thus liquid catalysts or catalysts in solution in the reaction medium are said to be homogeneous when the compound or compounds being reacted are in the liquid state. Among the known homogeneous catalysts are the catalytic metal salts and organometallic complexes of metals selected from the group comprising Ruthenium, Rhodium, Palladium, Osmium, Iridium and Platinum. These compounds are known to be active in the hydrogenation, hydroformylation, isomersation, cracking and dehydrogenation of organic molecules.
These known catalysts have suffered from the disadvantage that they are difficult to recover from the reaction medium due to their homogeneity with the reaction medium. As these catalysts are extremely costly to produce even very low levels of losses are economically unacceptable.
Proposals have been made to render known homogeneous catalysts heterogeneous such as by anchoring the catalysts to a solid substrate. The reaction medium could then be caused to flow past the immobilised catalyst. The difficulty with this suggestion is that the methods of anchoring suggested have either rendered the catalysts inactive or the anchoring has been insecure to a degree where an economically unacceptable level of catalyst has leached from the substrate as the reaction medium flows past the immobilised catalyst.